I am strongly becoming empowered by other artists’ images. I have been working with several other artists from around the world who have submitted images and writings that I have been creating galleries of for this project. It means spending a great deal of time with each image to build page by page and the more I study others work and talk to them the more I somehow become connected to their worlds. There is such strength in the impression they impart on their works no matter the style of medium they work. Each piece needs to be studied individually to really understand its power. In many ways it’s unfortunate to show such a large body of work because it forces us to skim through it as a collection without really paying attention to the detail. Where as each piece is a single moment suspended in time, which has often taken hours, days, some times even months to create. I am beginning to realize the images should be looked at individually. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we are inundated with so much imagery that we often just spend a few moments working our way through the vastness of it all. In olden days, images were hung on a wall of a gallery, museum, or salon and you were forced to interact and respond to the pieces that hung before you and when something really caught your eye you could linger and try to unravel it’s mysterious influence. I don’t think this happens so much anymore. We may bookmark or download an image and it becomes part of a vast collection, we may never even get back to again, because there is something new to see. And often times when we do go back and look at an image it will not have the same impact it had in the first place because we have changed and now see it from another perspective. But if we linger long enough, the power of the artists’ vision begins to take hold and influences the way we see ourselves and our own sense of our own creation and we see the artist as a mirror to ourselves. In the 1972 version of the film “Cabaret” the director Bob Fosse borrowed an idea from the original script in which the play ends by dropping a large mirror down so the audience can literally see the reflection of themselves revealing and asking us to examine the judgmental racism of Nazi Germany within ourselves. It is a powerful moment of the show. Though it doesn’t quite work on film the mirror is still there and becomes a reflection turning our focus inward. Art dealing with the still taboo subject of male nudity still has that impact and I am delighted to be and adoringly enamored to the be the in company of such amazing talents.
Category Archives: Cinema, film & movies
The Promotion of Creative Idealism
I have a young extremely talented filmmaker friend who has developed a brilliant script that he is trying to raise funding to produce. It’s going to be an extremely low budget film with a wallop. I have read the script and it very good and having seen this kid’s work from the past I totally can see his vision and know he can pull it off to create something extraordinary. The story centers around a guilt-ridden custodian of a decaying hotel that is dragged back from despair by a mercurial young woman with her own bleak past.
He has assembled some very talented team people that are exactly right. The kids name is Kelley Mattingly and his entire life is about living, eating, and breathing film. He has the idealist dreams of art and creating for the sake of artist vision, of revealing ones soul through the process of creation. The difficulty is that he cannot figure out how to promote or get the project out there to find support. His approach and campaign has not drawn much attention and it’s breaking my heart to see it flounder. At first the project was not very well defined as to what it was or what it was about, but he has done a good job of clarifying it. Second his graphics do not draw us into the project, because there is no appeal. In fact when you see it as a thumbnail image it has no presence at all. The design does match the essence and feel of the project but if it doesn’t pull us in we are not going to be pulled into supporting it. Thirdly Kelley is a recluse who doesn’t network to beat the bushes and drum up support. He has put the project on Kickstarter, but nobody seems to be supporting him. At first glance I don’t think people would really be drawn to the project at all. He has not established his reputation yet and without a network of supporters it becomes very difficult to make yourself known. Though the project has a lot of heart, he has given it an obscure name, “Hotel Finlen”, who’s only significance or allure will be recognizable to only the people who live in the small town of Butte, where it will be filmed, and unfortunately are very unlikely to support such an endeavor. When I did my own Kickstarter program this past summer, I constantly had to promote it through my vast network of established supporters via Facebook and constant email updates.
So what I really wanted to get at today is where do we draw the line of promotion of our selves as artists and sacrificing our creative idealism? He has the vision and approaches it completely for the sake of art, but has regrettable given it no mass appeal or hook. Is that line of artistry then lost if the project cannot even get started? It seems in our youth we really don’t want to compromise our creative idealism and many of us never learn the process of self-promotion. I know at that age I certainly didn’t either. It then becomes a painful growth process of stumbling through the dark without the added support, luckily I did have patrons who did believe in me and helped me along the way. I also worked on more of an individual creative process bringing in collaborators as I needed them and not really needing to promote myself. I was also able to use part of my talents to sustain myself on a commercial level while allowing my skills to develop and acquire the needed tools and kept my art always in the background. Here he has a larger creative team that needs to be supported and has cost associated for completion. As young artists in remote places like Montana, which is a state notoriously known for not supporting the arts; it becomes even more difficult to find a footing. Though I have been developing and shooting this male nude project for years, it remained completely obscure and hidden, not really knowing how to promote or expose myself to the world outside my confined little studio. It has now taken me thirteen years to put what I do out for others to share. This is the year I have made that leap and the journey has been phenomenal for me, but you who have followed this project from the beginning have been witness to the struggle and the obstacles I have overcome. I now somehow wished I had made that leap in the beginning because I somehow always knew this is where I wanted to end up. But looking back I wonder if I would have found this vision and what it would have become today if I had. It has been the expression of my life and soul and is the vision of what I have become.
A Shift of Consciousness
I have to say I was a bit lost most of yesterday. The website went up at about 11:30. Glenn left at 1 pm for a week of UPS training to become a utility driver for peak season to spend the week in Billings. I went for a long walk along the river to clear my head. Though the sun was out it was not warm enough the melt the snow dabbled on the pine trees. The leaves have not completely fallen yet and now there is snow. It feels like I have been asleep for a very long time and have not really felt the changing of the season this year. My fall has been inside, focused on a massive project and suddenly my senses are awake and alive again. I did some light shopping and found some lamb chops at the store. I love grilled lamb, but never have it because Glenn dislikes it so much. I went home and settled into a lazy afternoon of lounging about wanting to somehow celebrate, but mostly trying to figure out and put into perspective what I have accomplished. I dabbled on cleaning the website here and there, not wanting to delve to deeply but to savor the unfounded glory. It was time to see what has happened in the world in the past two months of my absence. I began to look at fellow artist and what they have been producing. It seems Facebook has now become a means of tagging and posting and less a means of communication. And I began to ponder have we all run out of things to say to each other? Perhaps we are all just becoming more focused. I tried to watch a movie on Netflix, but it no longer seems to work. Here one of my greatest passions has somehow imploded itself. I had shut down getting the discs by mail when they raised the prices and I was so involved in the project, that I wasn’t watching them anyway and only kept the streaming, but had forgotten that it simply doesn’t stream on Sundays. How could something so brilliant completely destroy the foundation of its livelihood. I was very resentful at their decision to split the service, but I guess I vote with my dollar and I have said “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore”. The theater world seems the same, Phantom is still running after 22 years with no end in sight, the new musical Pricilla seems to have grown stronger from its initial lukewarm start, and Hugh Jackman is returning in a one man show. Now there is a talented man who can do it all, he was ever so brilliant in The Boy from Oz as he flashed that big warm smile at me in the 4th row many seasons back. Avenue Q has down sized and moved to a smaller venue that seems to have revived its longevity.
I spent the afternoon drifting in a universe of my own creation, so near, yet so far from my current existence, drifting in and out of consciousness. It was almost like I could see myself separating from itself. Am I am even slightly aware of my own life? Somehow it doesn’t feel like it. As I began to realize I was caught in that post partum creation lull that I used to feel at the end of the tour or the jet lag you feel from flying across the ocean west. I finally understand the meaning of lost in translation. Oh yes and today it’s that odd shift toward or away from daylight savings time, which I can never figure out, where we are just naturally out of sync with the day. It feels like my life has come to a stand-still and yet I look back at this year and am astonished by my own accomplishments. All I can think is it’s time to somehow renew the creative process again. I am now ready to get back into the studio and shoot something new.
The Changing of a Season
It’s official, it’s the first day of winter in Montana, and I woke up this morning to see the trees above my bed, through the skylights covered in a blanket of white snow. To me this signifies the turn of the season as this also signifies the turning point of another phase of my life and existence as an artist. The chosen sampling of galleries for the website were finished last night and many of the bugs worked out through out the day so it will be officially up and running tomorrow morning. I am cleaning up link adding articles, and getting the blog transferred over today. Wow what a trip this has been!!!!! A peaceful calm is settling into my body this morning as I ride the edge of nervous energy of anticipation. I remember this feeling well from my days of working in the theater. It’s the dress rehearsal right before the show opens, when you know everything is in place and you are ready for the audience to see the production and you are just tweaking and refining the details. In a sense my entire life has been a production of some sort. As a kid I was always producing something. I think back to my brothers and cousins and all those shows I made them create in the barnyard on summer eves when we were little kids, they some how always believed in my crazy ideas and followed my strange endeavors. Will I always be this creative? Probably so, organizing the senior citizens in what ever center I end up in our scooter carts creating some sort of show.
I finally got a good night’s sleep last night and sleep in this morning. The truth is I feel like I could sleep for a week.
It’s game day in Missoula and I am still not feeling too well from the nasal thing that I have been fighting all week and so I have opted to stay home and watch the game on television, bummer. Though today’s image isn’t naked, I have to be with the Montana Grizzles in spirit so I am posting some images I took a few weeks back so I can feel like I can be there in spirit. Now that I think about it I feel like the Griz players about to emerge into the arena through the cloud of smoke to a stadium of avid and adorning fans. GO GRIZ!!!!!
The good news is I am catching up with myself and getting all the stuff done around the house that I have been neglecting for the past week.
Lack of Intimacy In A Creative World
Sorry no blog yesterday, every time I sat down to do it I would get distracted by something else. It was one of those extraordinary fall days outside that was sunny and unusually warm for this time of the year. I had my nephew Brenden come over and help me clean the property and prep it for the winter. I somehow thought I would be able to put him to work and I would get to write and work on my computer. But he is not very experienced and I began to realize the work of pruning and cleaning the beds was only specific to me. It was so beautiful out that I just decided to stay and get everything caught up. Then we had Glenn’s mother for dinner in the afternoon, because I had a wedding consult at 5:00, to shoot a wedding next month, and had to attend the dress rehearsal for a University production at 7:00, for a shoot on Wednesday night. When I got home it seems a bit late to blog so I settled in with Glenn. This seems to be the extent of all of my days.
The production I saw the rehearsal for was called Grace And The Art Of Climbing and seemed to focus on a woman dealing with intimacy issues. It really got me thinking about my own life and I began to question if perhaps I too have intimacy issues of my own. I began to think about relationships in my past and how perhaps I have pushed so many people away. When I began to ask Glenn about his perceptions of me and how I function within our relationship? He genuinely said he was happy and realized I had lots to accomplish. Most of the time I feel so focused that I know I am not really present to him and our relationship, and often times it feels like I notice him in the distance watching me. From my past experiences it seems the points of my life where I have been highly creative are the points where the relationship begins to falter. I cannot equally focus my attention in both directions at the same time. That’s why in the fall when Glenn goes off for two months to work somewhere else I try to focus on huge creative projects and seem to get the most productive work accomplished. I think artists in general are people who suffer from relationships more then anyone else because we have to disconnect and rechannel our passion toward what we create. Life in art is not easy and I think this is why many artists are single and probably drink and or use drugs. When we are creative our intimacy is our art. I am lucky, Glenn recognizes this and allows me that creative flexibility with little demand in return, in fact supports, it by taking care of the everyday things that distract me from the creative process.
I am reminded of an incident when I first met Glenn and I was asked to work as an associate director for a large film festival we used to have here in Missoula. I was responsible for logistically pulling the entire festival together. I worked with a woman named Cinda Holt who had help Robert Redford organize the Sundance festival in it’s early stages and we created a similar festival here in Missoula for and with artisans behind the camera: art directors, cinematographer, writers, directors. We screened films for a week and brought in all the filmmakers including Kenneth Turan from the LA Times to facilitate the event. For this project I had to book the films, that spaces, contact all the people and logistically get them to and from Montana, arrange accommodations and coordinate the mass army of volunteers to make the project happen. For several weeks it was all consuming for 24/7 to pull the project off. The project was a huge success, but it about destroyed my relationship with Glenn at the time. He was so angry that he refused to attend any of the events I had just spent every ounce of my being orchestrating. This hurt me so deeply that my own partner would not stand beside me at a moment of my greatest achievement. I now recognize it was a defining moment in the relationship where I disconnected, perhaps we both disconnected. Our relationship has since grown. Now Glenn is my creative partner in all my wacky self-absorbed endeavors. My projects and creative life has since grown and some how we have all adapted. My days do not get any easier and my need or sense of accomplishment never seems to cease. I don’t promise it will get any easier, because I know that would be a lie all I can recommend it that you “fasten your seat belts because you are in for a bumpy ride” as Bette Davis says in All About Eve.
